Beginner Tips: Build Trust on Social Media To Engage More Customers

Many businesses use social media to promote their business and engage with their target audience. They hire designers, writers and social media experts to build a strong brand through a creative communication strategy.

Social media provided a level playing field to small businesses and individuals to compete with established brands and make a name for themselves without spending a fortune on their marketing efforts. Over time, the platforms became highly competitive and cluttered.

Today, building trust on social media is an uphill task for new businesses. Not all new ventures can afford to hire the top rated professionals to develop unique messaging. And yet, they have to become a reliable brand on social media to survive and thrive.

When you don’t have deep pockets, time and patience become your best friends. In real life, you consistently need to do genuine work to win the trust of the people. There is no shortcut; you have to be patient, take a stand and sacrifice short term gains to become an authentic voice in society. The same goes for building trust on social media.

No matter what business you are in, there are three things that you must do to become trustworthy on social media:

1) Be Accountable

As a business or an individual, you must be accountable for your actions, policies, products, services, or communication. The accountability is not meant only for customers. You have to be responsible towards your employees as well.

Through social media messaging, you need to prove that you are accountable for any action you or your employees take. Admit your mistake when necessary and ensure that the same doesn’t get repeated. If you are selling products or services of other brands (if you are a trader or brokerage firm), you have to be accountable for whatever information you provide to your customers.

In certain cases, you may not control the behavior of buyers or sellers. However, you need to handle the situation with complete responsibility and show this to your social media audience through appropriate messaging.

2) Be Transparent

Transparency develops trust. Being transparent is the easiest way to build trust in real life as well as on social media. However, being transparent is also tricky for the business. You can’t be 100% open, as it will go against your business interest to share everything publicly. However, you need to decide the degree of transparency you are willing to adopt to build trust. Some companies publish their income reports on their websites to build trust among their target audiences. This is an instance of a high level of transparency. Some of the businesses show real working and internal processes through videos, images or blogs. They hide the critical parts whereas show what is relevant for end users. This is the middle level of transparency. You need to decide whether you want to show a low, middle or high level of transparency to build trust for your brand.

3) Be Authentic

This is the most basic requirement for being trustworthy. Being authentic means being true to yourself. The Internet is full of expert articles and contents that shows how to do everything in your life. However, readers believe very few of these blogs.

If you want your content to be read and liked by the people, then be honest while writing. Don’t exaggerate the benefits of your products or services. No one can advise you on how to become authentic. You simply need to write your feeling and experiences honestly to become a trustworthy person or business.

If you change your stand to please a particular audience, then you will be like the politicians; loved by some and hated by others but trusted by none. The choice is obviously yours.

Concluding Remarks

It takes years to build trust — and five minutes to destroy it. Therefore, every word or graphic posted on your social media page should adhere to certain standards set by you. It doesn't mean that you should be afraid of making mistakes. It simply implies that being original and sincere towards your customers is an effective way of building a brand.

You can't buy trust. However, you can definitely sell a trustworthy brand at a premium price.

Have a long-term vision and be patient to deal with short-term hiccups and disappointments to build an ever enduring brand on social media.

Anthony Bergs is a project manager at Writers Per Hour. He always keeps an eye on the marketing sector to implement the best innovations into the strategies that he builds. He’s always open for new connections and partnerships

Share

9

48

Wow-Score

The Wow-Score shows how engaging a blog post is. It is calculated based on the correlation between users’ active reading time, their scrolling speed and the article’s length.

Comments

Social media it's greate place to find new friends but many people don't trusr such area and it's the main problem. But this article give us advices and warn us about danger situation [link removed by moderator]

It is really hard to trust in the internet nowadays especially in social media. This article just solved the problem most beginners are struggling in engaging customers in social media. Thank you for this insight.

It is really hard to trust in the internet nowadays especially in social media. This article just solved the problem most beginners are struggling in engaging customers in social media. Thank you for this insight.

Completely agree with what you have written. Social media without engagement is like a fish outside water. One must drive all efforts to drive engagement. You can check how we have driven engagement driven campaigns for our clients here [link removed by moderator]

Community Ranking System

Our SEMrush community rank reflects the level of your professional recognition in our community. We value quality contributions, so highly ranked members will get valuable incentives. Take part in discussions, write posts and speak on webinars, be friendly and helpful, and you will eventually get to the top of the ladder.

Newcomer

Either just recently joined or is too shy to say something.

Enthusiast

Occasionally takes part in conversations.

Helper

An experienced member who is always happy to help.

Master

A veteran community member.

Pro

Asks great questions and provides brilliant answers.

Expert

Provides valuable insights and adds depth to the conversation.

Guru

A bearer of digital marketing wisdom.

Superstar

Knows everything… well, almost.

Legend

Getting here is not easy at all!

We use cookies to give you the best online experience.
By using this website you agree with our cookie policy.